As discussed in commonly-assigned U.S. patent application, Ser. No. 285,891, filed Dec. 16, 1988, U.S. Pat. No. 5,008,827, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference, the United States currently has the world's largest postal system. The U.S. Post Offices currently handle in excess of 100 billion pieces of mail per year, about half the total volume handled throughout the world. The servicing of mail delivery involves three essential steps; collection, sorting and delivery. Collection takes place through a series of Post Offices spread throughout the United States. The United States has about 30,000 Post Offices that provide mail services in addition to 9,000 smaller postal centers which provide some type of mail service. Postal employees typically take letters and packages from mail box facilities to the nearest local office where it is accumulated for the sorting procedure. At the Post Office, postal clerks remove collected mail from sacks, bundle packages and segregate mail by size and class into separate categories. The mail travels by truck from local post offices to a central facility known as a sectional center. The United States has 264 sectional centers, some of which serve hundreds of local Post Offices. The sectional center processes nearly all the mail coming or going from its region. At the sectional center, high speed automated equipment sorts large volumes of mail.
A computerized machine known as a zip mail translator sorts the postmarked letters according to their destination post office. Postal workers selectively activate the machine's keyboard to send each letter on a conveyor belt into one of many bins. Each bin holds mail for a different Post Office or postal region. Mail addressed to locations outside the regions served by the sectional center are transported by truck, airplane or train by various carriers via various routes to other sectional centers for further sorting. Finally, postal clerks hand sort mail for the area served by the local office into bundles for each delivery route.
Current estimates indicate that the foregoing processing tasks necessarily involve in excess of half a million employees. Cost of maintaining and supporting sorting services at the central post office facilities, even including large scale use of automated equipment, has become staggering. Projections of substantial increases in volumes of mail being transported through central facilities, even with the advent of private delivery, telecommunications services, facsimile services and the like indicate a rapid expansion will be required of such facilities. Since the Postal Service is a private corporation and is expected to become self-supporting, rapidly advancing postal rates place greater and greater burdens on both user and the Postal Service in order to support such volumes of mail. In recognition of capabilities of certain high volume users to provide services to central postal facilities, which services may improve efficiency and reduce the amount of processing time required by the central serving facilities, the U.S. Postal Service offers substantial reductions in rates or discounts, provided that a user comply with certain requirements which will allow the U.S. Postal Service to take advantage of certain user-provided facilities to reduce its own work load. The concept of work sharing, wherein a user provides certain of the processing activities prior to delivering the mail to the postal system, has been proposed in the copending application and is therefore a positive innovation in the field of mail processing which may have a substantial impact in the future implementation of mail services.
However, placing a burden on the user to provide certain of the facilities and services which the U.S. central post office facilities now provide is an equally heavy burden for the user, and must be done in a manner which permits the user to realize substantial savings with its own increased work load by taking advantage of the reduced postal service rates while not exceeding the costs of providing such services on its own.
The Postal Service has already recognized the ability of users to preprocess certain kinds of mail and will accept mail in bulk or in batches delivered from a processor along with documentation or certification that its procedures and regulations have been complied with, and will accept such certification as prima facia justification for a reduction in Postal Service rates. Thus, for example, manifest systems, wherein a manifest is provided to the central post office representative of a batch of mail documents preprocessed by the user, are already known and do allow the user to realize substantial discounts. However, to realize such discounts requires the user to maintain within the user's facility information regarding internal postal procedures and regulations, such as rates, volume, quantity discounts and the like, in order for the post office facility to accept as valid a certification by the user that certain procedures mandated by the Postal Service have been complied with. Moreover, often a single user cannot generate on a regular basis sufficient mail pieces to make up a batch that would qualify for extra discounts or for the maximum discount available, or a batch of mail pieces addressed to one or a selected small number of destinations (determined by zip codes) sufficient to qualify for extra or maximum discounts, or, say, a batch of mail pieces addressed with a font or bar code for efficient processing by automatic optical character reader (OCR) equipment at the postal facility sufficient to qualify for extra or maximum discounts offered by the Postal Service.